ART REVIEW; The Renaissance Followed Him North

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: March 22, 2013

WASHINGTON — Albrecht Dürer had it all: the eye of a Raphael, the brains of a Leonardo, the looks of a cleaned-up Kurt Cobain. He produced the earliest known self-portrait drawing in European art when he was 13, and some of the first stand-alone
landscapes. He brought the pliant warmth of Italian Classical painting to the shivery Gothic north, and transformed the woodcut medium from semi-folk art to fine art, and very fine art indeed.

Before he hit 30, he was the polymath star of what we now call the Northern European Renaissance. If he was personally vain — in his adult self-portraits he looks like Jesus — you can’t blame him.

Traditionally, the category of great artist implies great painter, and Dürer was that, though there’s reason to think that he was at his most inventive, involved and expansive in his works on paper. Evidence for that argument is here in Washington,
in a startlingly generous exhibition called “Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints From the Albertina,“
opening at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday.

The show takes Dürer, who was born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1471 and died there in 1528, from the beginning to the end of his career. Some of his most famous images — “Praying Hands,” the ineffable watercolor and gouache painting
known as “The Great Piece of Turf” — are among the 100 or so works. Nearly all are from the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the premier repository of Dürer’s graphic art, though even
there they are rarely displayed in such breadth.

Dürer was the son of a goldsmith, and after some basic schooling — as an adult he lamented that he had not had more — was expected to join the family trade. But he soon demonstrated that he was meant for larger things. Was the teenage
self-portrait the tip-off? It certainly could have been. It is the first thing we see in the show, and it’s prodigious.

Done in 1484, it is an image, in silverpoint, of a longhaired youth with baby-fat cheeks and wide-open, mesmerized eyes gazing, almost certainly, at his reflection. If the young draftsman doesn’t get everything quite right, he still does a genius
job. And a lot of the Dürer to come is here: the adamant realist, the pictorial dramatist (he points a finger in a bold, clear-the-path way) and the formal virtuoso, tackling an unforgiving medium (with silverpoint,
if you make a mistake, you have to start from scratch) and mastering it.

For a while his life followed a standard bourgeois-artist route. He studied painting, with a sideline in printmaking, a guaranteed moneymaker. He hit the road for a year to check out the scene in other art towns, like Basel and Colmar. In 1494 he went
home to marry Agnes Frey, the daughter of a local burgher.

The marriage was arranged by the families, and socially advantageous. Was it a love match? Hard to say. Dürer ended up writing snide things about Agnes to friends; there were no children. Still, a quick ink sketch he did of her just before the wedding
feels affectionate. He depicted her as plain, a gawkily pensive girl with flyaway hair; under her figure he wrote the simple phrase, “Mein Agnes.”

Yet soon after his marriage, Dürer was traveling again, alone. This time he headed to Italy via the Alps, sketching plein-air landscapes as he went. Venice was his goal; he stayed about two years. When he returned again to Nuremberg, in 1496, he
brought Italy, or the experience of Italian art, with him, and settled down to deal with it, make it his own.

He had already started copying Italian prints; now he began a process of adapting Classical motifs to the Gothic conventions. The results, with their twisted, strenuous grace, aren’t easy to love, but they are invariably interesting. Like postmodern
hybrids, their power lies exactly in the fact that they seem unsettled, disruptive, on edge.

In an engraving called “The Sea Monster,” from around 1498, a nude woman, looking distressed, reclines on the back of a Triton who appears to be carrying her away. The story’s not clear; Dürer may have cooked it up just to do
a nude. In any case, his attention seems drawn equally, if not more, by the background, a tree-garnished northern landscape of mountains and fortress-towns, realistically detailed down to each leaf and stone. Once
our eyes go there, they tend to stay there, absorbed in nature, leaving the lady and her monster behind, odd Mediterranean strays in an alpensee.

Over all, the first third or so of the show feels disjunctive in this way. It’s a tour through the mechanics of an ambitious career in formation, as Dürer unsmoothly cuts and pastes images, shakes up mediums and illustrates theories about
perspective and portion. Sometimes the pedagogue wins out, as in dry diagrams of body types. Sometimes, fabulously, the sensualist-realist prevails.

In the 1503 watercolor “Virgin and Child With a Multitude of Animals and Plants,” he turns the world into a vast petting zoo. In the “Great Piece of Turf,” from the same year, he gives an insect’s-eye view of a clump
of grass that is also a mini-Eden, atremble with succulent life.

After his second stay in Venice, from 1505 to 1507, the hard-to-mesh parts in his art came together, particularly in his studies for paintings: images of heads, draped cloth and expressive hands — as often as not his own — drawn in dark
ink and light wash on colored paper. Forms he might once have treated as cranky, Germanic grotesques — an aged apostle’s head, for example — now have a highly polished, sculptural sheen. He
was at the peak of his powers, riding the crest of his fame, when, in 1512, he landed a powerful patron in Emperor Maximilian I, who asked Dürer to paint his portrait. A superb bust-length chalk drawing in
the show is a souvenir of the commission.

What Dürer was angling for was a lifetime imperial pension, and he got one, though at the price of taking on hackwork. Along with other court artists, he was ordered to design an array of ceremonial stage props to enhance the emperor’s status
visually. Most of this stuff — chariots, arches, froufrou armor — was just shiny, expensive junk, and a waste of creative energy. Dürer probably came to think so when, in 1519, Maximilian died,
and to the artist’s shock, the pension was revoked. But by then Dürer had already been going through something, a psychological or spiritual crisis, or a series of them. Traces are there in the art.

In 1513 his mother, to whom he was deeply attached, sickened and died a painful death, and Dürer produced three of his most densely detailed and symbolically fraught images, the woodcuts titled “Knight, Death and the Devil,” “St.
Jerome in His Study” and “Melancolia I.” Seen side by side on a gallery wall, they’re the optical equivalent of stages of mourning, from stoicism, to denial to nightmarish despair.

Existentially unnerved, the artist also began to dwell on the figure of Martin Luther, expressing an interest in painting him. Dürer ultimately may not have left Roman Catholicism behind, but his faith was shaken. He kept producing religious images,
though some of the latest pieces in the exhibition, which has been organized by Andrew Robison, senior curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery, are of secular or quasi-secular subjects.

In 1520, feeling financially stretched, Dürer traveled to the Netherlands and Cologne to hawk his prints, sketching, as always, as he went. He drew a view of Antwerp harbor with a few faultless pen strokes in otherwise empty space. In a zoo in Ghent,
he saw his first live lions and drew them too, swiftly, softly, in silverpoint, the medium of his youth.

On this trip, for a change, Agnes, by now a stout matron, came with him. He sketched her in casual half-length. Wearing a bulky bonnet with a scarflike chin strap, she is shown glancing off to one side, as if appraising everything around her, heavy-featured,
cool-eyed, unromantic, skeptical, a Nuremberg hausfrau. Yet he had depicted her a few years earlier in a very different way, in a study for a painting called “The Virgin and Child With Saint Anne,”
now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In that drawing, she is Anne, mother of Mary, grandmother of Jesus. She wears the same bulging headpiece, but now it tightly encloses her face, coming down to her eyebrows, covering her chin, so that just her mouth, slightly smiling, and her eyes, one
focused forward, the other drifting off, are visible. Set against a black ground, she’s a monument, marble-carved, and a spiritual force; and she’s Agnes, his Agnes, the grounded, stay-at-home spouse
of a brilliant international star and, you suspect, a source of the realness behind his shine.

“Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints From the Albertina” opens on Sunday and runs through June 9 at the National Gallery of Art, National Mall between Third and Ninth Streets, along Constitution Avenue NW, Washington;
(202) 737-4215, nga.gov.

PHOTOS: Albrecht Dürer: This exhibition at the National Gallery of Art includes “An Elderly Man of 93 Years,” from 1521. (C23); Dürer made the earliest known European self-portrait drawing, above, at 13, using silverpoint, a challenging
technique. More than 30 years later he drew his wife, Agnes, as St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, top left.; Some of Dürer’s most famous works were studies for paintings, including “Praying
Hands” and “Head of an Apostle Looking Up.” Both were drawn in 1508 in dark ink and light wash on colored paper, giving them a sheen.; In the 1503 watercolor “Virgin and Child With a
Multitude of Animals and Plants,” Dürer seems to depict the world as a vast petting zoo. (PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE ALBERTINA MUSEUM, VIENNA) (C26)